Bib. Me Free Bibliography Citation Maker. Select style search. Select style search. Search for a book, article, website, film, or enter the information yourself. Add it easily and continue. Add it easily and continue. Add it to your bibliography and continue citing to build your works cited list. Download bibliography. Download bibliography. Download your bibliography in either the APA, MLA, Chicago or Turabian formats. Battlestars Daybreak The worst ending in the history of on screen science fiction. Battlestar Galactica attracted a lot of fans and a lot of kudos during its. Here, in my final post on the ending, I present. This is a condemnation of course, but also praise, because. I mean it was the most disappointing ending ever. There are, of course, major spoilers in this essay. Other SF shows have ended very badly, to be sure. This is particularly true of TV SF. Indeed, it is in the nature of TV SF to end badly. First of all, its written in. Most great endings are planned from the start. TV endings. rarely are. To make things worse, TV shows are usually ended when the show is. They are often the result of a cancellation, or. Quite frequently. In such situations, a poor ending is to be expected. Dane Wigington GeoengineeringWatch. org. How many different types of chemicals has the human race already released into the biosphere The number is shocking beyond. Sadly, Im hard pressed to think of a TV SF series that had a truly great. Thats the sort of ending you might find in a great book or movie, the. Great endings will sometimes finally make sense out of everything, or. BibMe Free Bibliography Citation Maker MLA, APA, Chicago, Harvard. Im convinced that many of the worlds best endings came about when the writer actually. There have been endings that were better than the show. Star Trek Voyager. Among good SFFantasy shows, Quantum Leap. Buffy and the Prisoner stand out as having had decent endings. Babylon 5s endings plural. I praise Battlestar Galactica BSG by saying its ending sucked, Babylon 5s. What is commonly believed. B5s original planned ending, written before the show began, might. Ron Moores goals. To understand the fall of BSG, one must examine it both in terms of more general. SF, and the stated goals of the head writer and executive producer. Ronald D. Moore. The ending failed by both my standards which you may or may not care about but also his. Moore began the journey by laying out a manifesto of how he wanted to change TV. SF. He wrote an essay about Naturalistic science fiction where he outlined. I will summarize here, in a slightly different order. Avoiding SF clichs like time travel, mind control, god like powers, and technobabble. Keeping the science real. Strong, real characters, avoiding the stereotypes of older TV SF. The show should be about them, not the hardware. A new visual and editing style unlike what has come before, with a focus on realism. Over time he expanded, modified and sometimes intentionally broke these rules. He allowed the ships. He eschewed aliens in general. He increased his. The link to reality. In addition, his other goal for the end was to make a connection to our real world. To. let the audience see how the story of the characters related to our story. Indeed, the. writers toyed with not destroying Galactica, and leaving it buried on Earth, and. Central America. They rejected this ending because they felt it would violate our contemporary reality too quickly. Moore felt an alternative universe. The successes, and then failures. During its run, BSG offered much that was great, in several cases groundbreaking elements never seen before in TV SF Artificial minds in humanoid bodies who were emotional, sexual and religious. Getting a general audience to undertand the humanity of these machines. Stirring space battles with much better concepts of space than typically found on TV. Bullets and missiles, not force rays. No bumpy head aliens, no planet of the week, no cute time travel or alternate reality where everybody is evil episodes. Dark stories of interesting characters. Multiple copies of the same being, beings programmed to think they were human, beings able to transfer their mind to a new body at the moment of death. A mystery about the origins of the society and its legends, and a mystery about a lost planet named Earth. A mystery about the origin of the Cylons and their reasons for their genocide. Daring use of concepts like suicide bombing and terrorism by the protagonists. Kick ass leadership characters in Adama and Roslin who were complex, but neither over the top nor understated. Starbuck as a woman. Before she became a toy of god, at least. Baltar One of the best TV villains ever, a self centered slightly mad scientist who does evil without. Other superb characters, notably Tigh, Tyrol, Gaeta and Zarek. But it all came to a far. I will outline in too much detail The confirmationrevelation of an intervening god as the driving force behind events. The use of that god to resolve large numbers of major plot points. A number of significant scientific mistakes on major plot points, including. Twisting the whole story to fit a completely wrong idea of what Mitochondrial Eve is. To support that concept, an impossible to credit political shift among the characters. The use of concepts from Intelligent Design to resolve plot issues. The introduction of the nonsense idea of collective unconscious to explain cultural similarities. The use of big secrets to dominate what was supposed to be a character driven story. Removing all connection to our reality by trying to build a poorly constructed one. Mistakes, one of them major and never corrected, which misled the audience. And then Ill explain the reason why the fall was so great how, until the last moments, a few. Before examining these, it is worth examining some important elements from the. I am using. A defence of hard and soft science fiction. The term hard science fiction has two meanings. The first is SF that sticks to the laws. In true hard SF, you never do what is currently understood to be. This is. not enough to be hard SF of course, since romance novels also stay true to physicsThe second meaning is SF that revels in the science. It often loves to explain the intricate scientific. As you know, Bob. The story is about the unusual science it explores more than anything. This latter subset deserves some of the derision it gets. Its hard to do well. Worse, the more it. In Star Trek, the term technobabble was created to describe the nonsense you would often. Geordi or Data would explain how something on the Enterprise worked. In Moores naturalistic SF he wanted to keep the realism but eschew the over explanation. In. fact, not explaining things at all is often a great course. This is the right course for. TV for many of the reasons listed above, and often even for written works. The 1. 98. 4 novel. Neuromancer, considered one of the all time greats of the SF genre, was a novel about computers, AI. William Gibson, a man with minimal knowledge of these areas. Because of this, he. Even those who love hard SF often tolerate various violations of the laws of physics. The most common is faster than light travel, or FTL. So many stories, including BSG itself. FTL to work. There are other common tropes. Generally even fans of hard SF will. The more impossible things, however, the more disconnected the story is. A connection to reality allows a story an important opportunity for relevance to reality. It allows the statement, all of this could happen. It allows stories to explore real. I contend that SF that does this is SF at its finest. This is not to say that you cant explore real issues in non real SF and even fantasy. Or even real SF issues. Some great SF has done this entirely through allegory. Some SF. is written not to be about the future at all, but the present, and simply uses an unrealistic. That future need not be possible to deliver. But there is no denying that it helps. Sticking to reality also offers things that fantasy does not. We all know that when accused. A story that sticks to reality has a much better chance at being consistent. The writer may be tempted to rewrite the rules in a story and. First, your new rules must compete with the real worlds to make your setting as impressive, and secondly there will be. Sticking to reality may sound like a constraint on a writer, it may sound too. But in fact, I feel its the reverse. Constraints can improve. A story where literally anything can happen has no suspense and little. Writers of mainstream fiction, constrained as they are to real settings, are in no way. This is why, even though readers will suspend disbelief on a storys fantastic. If a writer resolves. In the broad sense, this sort of ending is called a. Deus ex machina, where something unexpected comes out of the blue. This literally means god from the machine, and there is some irony that. BSG literally featured a religion that came from the machines. If a story begins by showing us a wizard, we understand immediately that we. If a story with no magic introduces a wizard with.
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